


Bleeding Out

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Series: Falling Further [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Cuban beach house, Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal Loves Will, Hannibal has Feelings, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Murder, Post-Finale, Suicidal Will, Suicide Attempt, Will is a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 05:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9477611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Following a botched murder, Will spirals into deep depression, leading him to attempt suicide. Hannibal returns home in time to save him, but the aftermath of Will's self-inflicted injuries both he and Hannibal find old wounds bleeding anew, leading Hannibal to open up about his childhood.(CW - This fic contains graphic depictions of torture, murder, and attempted suicide. Please mind the tags).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is effectively a follow-up fic to "Scars," but it is not necessary that you read that story to be able follow this one.

As soon as Hannibal opened the front door he smelled the blood.

He stepped over the threshold and into the beach house, pulling the door shut behind him with the arm that was not occupied with the bag of groceries. Behind him, the lock engaged automatically.

A few steps into the interior and he was able to confirm by scent what he had already known intellectually, which was that it was Will’s blood - specifically and exclusively.

Coming into the kitchen, he glanced towards his work area, doing a quick mental inventory and concluding that all of the knives were in their usual places.

He paused in the kitchen only long enough to set the shopping on the counter. Green plantains poked out from the cotton bag. He had taken longer than he might have shopping, going from seller to seller looking for a type of fish that Will was especially fond of. On his way home he’d noticed a man on a street corner selling puppies, and he had stopped to consider buying one but had thought the gesture would be too obvious, bordering on mawkish condescension.

Hannibal felt now that these diversions had been a mistake - he ought to have stayed home or else found some way to induce Will to come with him.

Things had not been well with Will as of late. Will had not been well.  

In the bedroom now, and he could hear the water running on the other side of the bathroom door, the sound it made as it spilled over the edge of the bath. The carpet in front of the bathroom door was wet where water had leaked under the door. Steam flowed freely from the same crack that was admitting the water.

The bathroom door was locked against him. Hannibal stuck it once with his shoulder and the wood began to buckle, then again - a carefully measured application of force - and the door swung open. He took three quick steps over the the threshold, stabilizing himself as the momentum carried him forward so he did not slip on the wet floor.

Will was sitting up in the tub. His chin rested on his chest, head drooping like a flower on a tired stem. When Hannibal approached him, Will turned to look at him, briefly, his eyes dark pits in a pale field of snow, and he sighed a silent sigh that ran shudderingly down the entirety of his body. The he turned his face away from Hannibal.

Moving closer, Hannibal looked down into the tub and saw that Will was naked aside from a pair of white boxer shorts, which had been tinged pinkish by the blood in the water. Two common razor blades shimmered at the bottom of the tub. Will’s hands were under the water, and the blood that was flowing out from the cuts that Will had made in his wrists swirled and dissipated into the hot water.

Without taking his eyes off of his, Hannibal bent and reached into the under-the-sink cabinet for the first aide kit, from which he took two rolls of heavy gauze.

Will tried, briefly, to fight him, splashing blood across the bottom of Hannibal’s shirt when he tried to scratch at him with clawed fingers. He was weak, though, and gave it up as the exertion carried him into a semi-conscious stupor.

Hannibal lifted Will’s right hand out from the water and wrapped his wounded wrist under multiple layers of tight gauze, noting as he did that there were no hesitation cuts, just the single slash, deep and straight. He caught himself biting his own lower lip and forced himself to stop. Sitting Will’s hand on the edge of the tub, he tended to the second in the same way. The gauze slowed the flow of blood but did not halt it.

Hannibal pulled the chain to the bathtub’s plug and lifted Will, dripping, from the water.

It had been over two months since Hannibal had last had cause to carry Will somewhere, and though he was entirely aware that Will had been dropping weight at an alarming rate, Hannibal was struck by how insubstantial he felt.

Laying Will down on top of the sheets, Hannibal turned to the closet for his surgery kit. The duffle that held his other set of supplies caught his eye as he reached for the black bag, and he was reminded of how this had all begun.    

The target had seemed like a good one - not one to provoke the complex welter of disgust and identification in Will that Garrett Jacob Hobbs or Dolarhyde inspired - but the man was at least odious, Will agreed. When they happened upon him in the cafe, Hannibal watched Will as the man’s eyes crawled over Will’s scarred face before moving onto the both of them, watched as Will had reached across the table to take Hannibal’s hand in his own, a calculated provocation that had added to Hannibal’s pleasure at the gesture, and at the table across from them the man’s unvoiced judgement had radiated from his pores like a scent. It took no special talent for observation or for empathy to know what waited at the tip of his tongue, eager to be given an excuse.

The decision to move on him had felt more Will’s than his own, though the planning was all Hannibal’s. They’d ambushed the man in the early AM, and had driven with him in the back of their car to an isolated picnic grounds, quite empty now in the off season.

He'd guided Will into the active role, pinning the man belly-up to the top of a wooden picnic table while Will tied his arms and legs to the bench cross-pieces. There was a begrudging gentleness to the way that Will moved, even when he was yanking the rough rope tight enough to elicit a cry, a tenderness to the way he ran the flat of his blade along the man’s stomach, considering thoughtful where to place the first cut, and as he lifted the man’s gag away Hannibal had been excited.

It was true there was none of the frenetic energy that had marked their slaying of the Dragon here, no sense for Hannibal of having been brought to completion, of occupying two bodies and two consciousnesses at once. But it was fascinating, nonetheless, to watch the way Will took the terror that radiated off of the man into himself and let it pass through, surviving the fear with the knowledge that their victim would not.   

He'd hesitated then, lost in himself, and the man saw it and mistook it for softness and affixed his hopes onto the exploitation of that softness. He jerked his head towards Will, opening his mouth to speak, and Will moved the knife and a howl rose into the dawn sky and Hannibal smiled.

Yet that was where things began to go poorly. The man started to beg, wetly, all of it focused on Will, incoherent variations on the theme that Will could stop this, could keep Hannibal from hurting him, which struck Hannibal as an odd track to taken given that up to that point Will had been the only one to draw blood. The blathering had not fallen on Will the way that it would have for Hannibal, as a tedious but not entirely unpleasant sort of background music, but rather cut at him. The pleading - the words, or perhaps simply the sound of the words - began at once to visibly melt through the shell of outrage that had gotten Will this far. It was as though some switch had been flipped in his brain, and upon the change Will became as pale as if was his own blood dripping into the sand.

He’d looked at Hannibal, wounded and lost, and his eyes had said, _I want to go home, please take us home_ , but when Hannibal’s face remained impassive he tried to find a way to power through it.

“Gag him,” Will said, and Hannibal could tell from his voice how dry his mouth was. Yet it seemed more sensible - more in the interest of moving this along, for he'd become uneasy of his ability to manage Will’s affective responses to this situation - to take out the man’s tongue, so he did that, one quick and practiced motion, and because he knew that the man would undermine Will as easily with his eyes as he had with his words, he put them out as well.  

Will made a sound, barely discernible under the sounds that the man was making.  

“He thought that you were the weak link,” Hannibal explained, allowing his voice to carry a hint of warning, and when he looked up Will was glaring at him, anger sparking with breathtaking suddenness in his eyes.

“‘ _Thought_ ,’” he repeated, spiting the past tense, and the severity of the mistake that he'd made came to Hannibal, as sudden insights often did when he was close to Will, in a way that was entirely different from now he usually read other people - not a rational evaluation or the direction of instinct, but pure emotional intuition. That intuition told him now that in rendering the man unintelligible he'd made the problem many times worse, that Will could not be cut off from the humanness of his victim, should under no circumstance be prevented from seeing and understanding and feeling what the victim saw and understood so that he could pull it all into himself and weave it into a narrative the same way that a oyster soothed the irritation when a piece of grit got inside of its shell by forming a pearl around it. Absent that, there was nothing compelling or interesting about the man or his pain. Absent that, it was all real and immediate in a way that allowed for no construction of barriers to cage in his own fear and his disgust at the mess and at Hannibal and above all at himself.

Will backed away from the writhing mass of meat on the table. “Why don’t you just buy a side of pork to cut on, and save us all a hell of a lot of trouble?” he demanded. Then his throat spasmed, and he turned and bolted for the car, where he was violently sick in the footwell.

Hannibal followed shortly behind, glad at least that Will had retained the presence of mind to avoid leaving evidence in the beach grass, though his nose wrinkled when Will pulled himself up into the car, apparently oblivious to the mess.  

Hannibal slide in behind the driver’s wheel and waited. If the dashboard clock could be trusted, he waited nearly ten minutes before Will spoke, his voice full of broken glass and a bitter effort at humor. “Not what you were hoping for, huh?” When Hannibal didn’t answer him, Will answered himself in Hannibal’s own voice. “A staggering disappointment.”

Hannibal frowned. Will glanced at him, furtive, then quickly looked down at his hands. “Will you kill me?” he said, and there was nothing in his voice to tell Hannibal if that was a question or a request.   

He reached out and put a hand on Will’s knee, squeezed. “These things happen, Will. You can try again some other time.” His hand left a smear of blood on Will’s jeans, but it didn’t matter - it had been the plan from the beginning to burn the clothing that they were wearing.

Hannibal got out of the car and strolled back to the table. There had been no fault in Will’s knots, good fisherman that he was, but they'd left the man to his own devices for quite some time, and he'd managed to get one arm free and was working on the other.

  
Hannibal had thought to simply lift his chin and cut his throat, but he felt Will’s eyes on him, watching from the car, and did not wish to provoke distressing associations on top of everything else. He took the man, who had not heard his approach, by the bicep of his free arm and pressed him back down against the table. Folding his free hand over the man’s mouth, he hooked his thumb under the jaw to hold it shut and pinched his nose closed. He stood like that until the man stopped struggling, and then for another two minutes to be safe, watching the distant fishing boats on the horizon while he counted down the time.

  
Then he took out a handkerchief and wiped down every exposed area of the picnic table, smearing the blood when he came to it to obliterate fingerprints. He did the same to the leather of the dead man’s boots and to his belt and its metal buckle. When he was finished with that, (and it took Hannibal hardly a few minutes), he picked up a palm frond and wiped out his own tracks, as well as the ones that had been left by Will and the dead man, leaving for later only those that followed the same path that he would take back to the car. He picked up Will’s knife from where it had fallen in the sand and put it in his pocket. Before leaving he paused once again to check for a pulse, and though the flutter that he thought he felt was almost certainly only his imagination, he repeated the previous exercise for another three minutes before wiping down the man’s face.

He left without so much as a cutlet, disgusted by the lack of artistry to the scene that they left behind.

It was a long drive back to the beach house, and by the time they arrived Will was nearly catatonic. That had been the second most recent time that he had carried Will to the bed, and it had marked the beginning of the dramatic decline in his mental health that brought them to tonight.

Will had been resistant to taking medication, though it was evident even then that he needed it badly. Hannibal would have insisted - with force, if needed - usually, but a feeling of wary unease had slipped into all of his interactions with Will. Handling suicidal individuals was a part of his profession, but never before had he gone in such fear of taking a misstep.

His own nightmares had been worse lately, too. Having Will with him hadn’t helped as much as he had hoped it would, even before the botched job at the picnic grounds. The tooth child visited nearly every night now, and with it the memory of the cold and the hunger and the hideously lonesome terror of understanding that the men would come again soon and why they would come and trying to protect Mischa from that same understanding.

He was almost certain that Will would survive - this attempt, at least - but if he'd come home even five minutes later it may well have been to a corpse. It struck Hannibal that, despite every risk he had taken and sacrifice that he had made to get them here together he might still lose Will, and irrevocably.

Now, leaving Will on the bed Hannibal went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He reached into the back of the fridge and took a paper bag from the back of the bottom shelf. Inside, there was a bag of blood for transfusion, type O negative, that he'd placed there nearly three weeks earlier, having lifted it from one of the local donation centers, just for caution’s sake. Since the depressive spiral had begun, Will had shown little interest in food, and was in any case not in the habit of snooping in the fridge, and so Hannibal was fairly certain that Will hadn’t known about it. Most likely, he would have destroyed it if he had.

“Crazy sonofabitch,” Will muttered darkly, voice surly and slurred, when Hannibal came back into the bedroom and set the transfusion bag on the bedside table to begin to warm. “Leave me alone.”  

“I didn't expect you to be lucid,” Hannibal said. A small ray of hope - he hadn't tried to tear at his bandages during the twenty seconds that Hannibal was gone, though it was entirely possible that Will could be binding his time for a better opportunity.

He put his black bag on the night table and pulling a stool up to the side of the bed, sat. He picked up one of Will’s hands and balanced it palm-up on his thigh. Blood was still seeping through the gauze, the red stains growing.

Raising his eyes to Will, he asked, “Do you want a local anesthetic?” Will snorted, but Hannibal refused to rise to the bait. “Since we can’t be sure how much blood you lost I wouldn’t want to risk too much, but something…”

He made the injection in Will’s forearm, right above the gauze bandages, then tightened a tourniquet above his elbow before unwrapping the gauze, which was tacky with blood. He sanitized the area around the wound, slid on a set of gloves and began. The local hadn’t really had enough time to work but Will sat impassively, looking out over Hannibal’s shoulder.

“Why did you cut horizontally?” Hannibal asked, without raising his eyes from the stitching.

“Imitation is flattery. I wanted to avoid any implications.”

“Young Matthew did a poor job - missed both arteries completely, for all his enthusiasm. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But do you mean that you didn’t want scars that match my own?”

“I wasn’t planning on scars at all.”

“Well. Regardless, this is mended easily enough. Did you leave a note? I can bring it to you later if you like, I needn’t read it if you don’t want me to, but I think that it would be important to bear in mind - ”

“Hannibal. What do you want?”

“What I’ve wanted from the start, Will. For you to feel better.”

Will fell silent. Hannibal finished stitching and rebandaged Will’s right wrist and then moved on to the left. When he was done, he started an IV line in the back of Will’s hand and got out an IV pole from which to hang the transfusion bag.

“This won’t replace all that you lost, I suspect, but it will make an improvement - you’re white as a sheet, Will.

“Now, it’s going to feel a little chilly since I don’t have a blood warmer, but as long as you stay under the blankets it won’t be a problem.”  

“You can’t keeping me from trying again. You don’t control that.”

“I know. I can only hope that you change your mind about wanting to die. There would be a deficit in the world without you.”  

“Leave me alone,” he said again, and knowing that he could not watch Will all of the time, Hannibal said, “When your IV is empty I will.”

It took a little over two hours for the bag to run dry. Twenty minutes in, Will had started to shiver, but it was obvious that he did not want Hannibal near him and it had not seemed wise to push him. Eventually, as the remaining contents of the transfusion bag reached room temperature and his body warmed up the blood he’d already gotten through the transfusion, the shivering stopped and Will drifted off to sleep.

When it was time, Hannibal slid his shoes off and moved quietly to Will’s side. When he removed the IV line from the back of his hand, Will frowned but did not awaken. Hannibal closed the door carefully behind him when he left the bedroom so the sound would not disturb Will.

His shirt was smeared with blood and still wet where the bath water had splashed him, so he striped it off and tossed it on the floor next to the trashcan. He stopped at one of his caches behind a loose piece of baseboard in the kitchen, and took out a rectangular box roughly the size of a pack of cards.

Then he went outside.  


	2. Chapter 2

During the crisis, Hannibal had worked quickly but skillfully, aware of his affective responses but undistracted by them. His stitches had been even and neat, and he had placed the IV needle smoothly on the first attempt. Now, though, standing alone under the full moon, it all started to catch up with him. He paced the length of the front walk, padding across the cobblestones on bare feet, trying to justify the hammering of his heart and the tightness in his chest.

His own scars twinged when he thought about Will’s poor wrists, a sensation that was bizarre to him at the best of times and entirely unwelcomed now. The tremor in his left hand, which had come and gone since Will cut him vicariously, started up now, and he supposed that he ought to be grateful that it had waited until now to trouble him, but he was struck by a sudden stupid desire to pound is fist against the side of the house until the shaking either stopped or the pain became such that he no longer noticed it.

Instead, he drooped down on the wide concrete edge of the flowerbed that fronted the house and wrapped his arms around himself, sweating and breathless and every muscle taut with tension.

He understood perfectly well that this was a panic attack - it was far from his first, though this one seemed unprecedented in its length and intensity, at least in comparison to those he had experienced in his adult life - but his conscious mind and what his body was doing felt to him poorly integrated. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, riding it out as best he could.

When the attack lifted the palsy in his left hand remained, and he fought back against the fear that sought to descend on him when a voice inside of himself offered the suggestion that it might not go away at all this time.

Trying to shake the idea off, he reached into the pocket where he had secreted the cigarettes, drawing one out of the pack and lighting it with a flame that jittered in his shaky hand. It was stale - the pack had already been open when they came to the beach house, and he had only taken it from its hiding place three times before in all the months that they had been here, but with the first drag he felt marginally more calm.

“You're smoking, doctor!” Will said from the edge of the walkway, his voice weak but astounded.

“Tonight is hardly the time for you to make value judgements about risks that others take to their health.”

Will sat down beside him. It had been a short walk to the front of the beach house but Will was out of breath. “You are prone towards oral fixations,” he informed Hannibal.

“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” he said, and blew smoke. “Or at least, try to do better than that.”

“Mm. Well. You’re sitting out here half naked where the neighbors could see, you smell like copper pennies and every muscle in your back and shoulders looks like it’s carved from wet stone. You’re fucked up, obviously, but I could use context.”

“What possibly might have happened recently to fuck me up?” Hannibal said, flicking his cigarette butt onto the driveway so he could prop his chin on his hand and mime a man pondering a challenging question. “An aside, by the way - you’re manic.” He didn’t trust this reversal, the sudden chattiness - he’d seen this lightness in too many suicidals, who having decided to die let go of all the things that had been pulling them down.   

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Are you sure that you would like it if I did? I know how inconvenient it is for you when you find yourself feeling badly for me.”

Will looked injured. “That’s not -” he started, before dropping the point as fruitless. “I asked because I wanted the answer.”

“It is rooted in a combination of childhood trauma and a need for protective coloration,” Hannibal said expansively, as though he was reading from someone else’s chart. “One takes on the habits of one’s captors if one wishes to survive them, as you know, and the ineptitude of a ten year old attempting to mimic such an adult habit is endearing to a certain low type of man. Perhaps they feel protective towards you. Perhaps then you eat more regularly. Perhaps, when they come for one of the children, it is not you who they take away.”

“Not you or your sister,” Will said. “If it works. But it didn’t, did it?”

Hannibal’s voice was flat and steady and low, and he bled every atom of threat that was within himself into it. “We will never speak about that,” he told Will.

He watched Will to make sure that he understood, and then he turned his face up toward the moon and set his voice to sound flippant. “In short, Will, I smoke when I feel trapped.”    

Will was still for a while, then he nudged Hannibal’s shoulder with his own to get his attention. He motioned with his jaw towards Hannibal’s trembling left hand. “I’ve never seen it that bad.”

“It’s half emotional exhaustion. You’ve had me a wreck these last few months.”

“Sure.”

“Do you require proof? Shall I tear myself open for your edification, get down on my knees, beg you to stay alive?”

“Christ, don’t.”

“If it will make any difference, I will.”

“Don’t.”

“You know how I feel.”

“Yeah, well. A lot of the time I wish that I didn’t.” Will licked his lips, turned his bandaged arms palms-up in his lap. He was quiet for a long time, but when he lifted his head and looked at Hannibal his face was set in such a way that Hannibal knew that he had made a decision.

“Do you love me?” Will asked, and Hannibal, beginning to smile, opened his mouth to answer, but Will pressed on. "If I told you that I was going to stop, would you still love me? Would you let me stop?”

“What exactly are you asking for?”  

“I need time... to figure out how to survive myself as the person you want me to be.”

“You have that, Will. I have already given you that, and you can continue to take as much time as you need.”  It was overwhelming, always, the way that his fear of losing Will could pummel him. In the past, his need to escape it had driven him into cold rage and poorly considered acts. Lately, though, it had frozen him into inaction, had undermined his confidence that he knew where they ought to be headed and how to get the both of them there.

He thought this was a mistake, now, to concede - that Will was only avoiding the truth of himself, pounding himself down into less that what he ought to be, perhaps doing irreparable harm to himself in the pursuit of pointless exercises in guilt and self-loathing. But he knew - did not _think_ but _knew_ \- that whatever had gone wrong for Will was a result of Hannibal’s own miscalculation, and that if he multiplied that error now by pushing too hard he would lose Will, irreparably.

“I waited seven years for you to understand - for you to see,” he said, discovering the words only as he spoke them. It was difficult for him. “I can wait some more, Will. As long as you need.”

Will’s hand on top of his own was cold as ice. Will held tight, though Hannibal could see in his face how flexing the muscles hurt his wrists. Hannibal put his other hand over-top of it, trying to transfer some warmth back into it.

After a little while, they went back inside.  


End file.
